9 Songs

Dead Oceans;
2014

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Music from this release

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: two teens from the suburbs of Los Angeles with a nonsensical band name make a sloppy but inspired psychedelic racket, get signed to a Secretly Canadian subsidiary imprint, and make an album under the tutelage of an older, more seasoned mentor. That’s the Foxygen origin story in a nutshell, but just a year after that band’s Richard Swift-produced breakthrough, We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, their 23-year-old guitarist Jonathan Rado is already eager to replay the script—only this time, he’s promoted himself to the big-brother role.

Dub Thompson—that is, singer/guitarist Matt Pulos and drummer Evan Laffer, both 19—hail from Agoura Hills, the next burg over from Foxygen’s native Westlake Village. And one presumes Rado saw some of Foxygen’s industrious, irreverent spirit in his fellow county-folk, resulting in an invite to record their debut album in a house Rado was renting last summer in Bloomington, Ind. But the band heard on 9 Songs proves to be less Foxygen’s dutiful doppleganger than its evil twin. Where Foxygen put an absurdist, playful spin on the canonical classic rock of Dylan, the Beatles, and the Stones, Dub Thompson proffer a combustible collision of various record-collector subgenres—’60s proto-punk garage, Beefheart-ian skronk, Krautrock, discofied post-punk, hardcore, mid-‘80s American indie, and, yes, even a daub of dub—all captured by Rado in a perfectly grainy patina that makes it sound like the band is performing on a live pirate-radio broadcast in the basement. And though Dub Thompson wear their rough edges proudly—and don't yet feel the urge to develop their melodic craft beyond one-line lyrics and monotone shouts—the unfinished veneer feels less a product of slackadasical whimsy than an urgency to cram as many oddball ideas into their songs as possible.

But for all the hyperactive energy and compulsive structural shifts in effect here, 9 Songs rarely feels like a mess. Fortunately, this is a band that gets most of the silliness of its system through nomenclature: 9 Songs actually only contains eight tracks—one of which is an acid-splattered instrumental titled “9 Songs”. And while there are songs about dinosaurs (“Pterodactyls”), there are also songs that sound like they’re about dinosaurs but actually aren’t (“Epicondyles”, which is the bone joint prone to tennis elbow—no doubt an epidemic malady in their hometown). But for the most part, Pulos and Laffer attack their material with an authority and simmering menace that allows seemingly incompatible elements to come together in surprisingly complementary ways: the no-verse, all-chorus single “No Time” finds an ideal home for a Nuggets-worthy harmony hook in the midst of a reggafied funk strut; “Dograces” hitches a deadpan vocal and grimy 4/4 groove to a regal keyboard fanfare and marching-band breakdown that suggests LCD Soundsystem gone prog.

Inevitably, when a band is being pulled in so many directions, they’re bound to drift down a wayward path, and the carnivalesque prance of “Ash Wednesday” makes you wonder why Dub Thompson saved their most focused performance for their most tedious song. But if not all of Dub Thompson’s ideas work, the more important takeaway is that, at this early stage, they sound like a band with no lack of them.